Bad SEO Tactics and Common Mistakes

Once upon a time, search engine optimization (SEO), was like
the Wild West - no rules, and people could do pretty much anything
to get their websites up to the top of the search engine
listings. Those days have long gone, however, and the rule of
law prevails. Search engines know all the tricks, and are not
slow to penalize any website that attempts to use them. In
this article, we'll look at the things you should definitely avoid
if you're trying to optimize your site for web searches. Duplicate
Content Copying content from another site and placing it on your
site is a definite no-no. Not only is this bad SEO practice,
it's copyright infringement too. You could find yourself in
trouble with the law, as well as in trouble with the search
engines. Be aware that other sites might duplicate your
content, so if you suspect this has happened and that your
rankings have suffered as a result, contact the search engine
immediately.Cloaking This is a way of directing visitors to a
different website, by disguising or cloaking the information that
appears in the address bar. Search engines have bots that
will detect this very easily - but you can't detect them, since
they're unnamed and come from undisclosed IP addresses.
Cloaking is a very quick way to get your site banned. Invisible
Keywords This is the practice of stuffing apparently blank space on
a website with keywords, written in the same color as the
background so that you can't see them. You might also find
keywords written in a very tiny font at the foot of a web
page. Again, this is something that search engines can easily
detect, and it usually results in a ban.Javascript Manipulation
Overusing javascript is a very poor SEO tactic. Although
search engine crawlers can't read javascript at the present time,
if there's too much of it on your site, it will set alarm bells
ringing and the search engine will start to look for evidence of
other banned practices. Although you can't avoid using
javascript to a certain extent, use as little of it as you possibly
can, and keep it in separate file from the main site.In the end,
you can't fool the search engines in the long term, so why waste
your energy? If you can devote all the time and ingenuity
that you've put into sneaky SEO tactics into making your site user
friendly, content rich and legitimately optimized for keywords,
your site will naturally climb up the rankings and you'll never
have to worry about being banned.